Showing posts with label And Then There Were None. Show all posts
Showing posts with label And Then There Were None. Show all posts

Monday, May 11, 2015

Picks from Chip: And Then There Were None

Film: And Then There Were None
Format: Turner Classic Movies on rockin’ flatscreen.

This is the fifth in a series of twelve films suggested by Chip Lary at Tips from Chip.

The vast majority of my pleasure reading is non-fiction. I tend to read a lot of science and similar topics—cosmology, evolutionary biology, sociology, and the like. So it’s rare that I come across a movie where I’ve actually read the source material. In the case of And Then There Were None, I actually have read the source material. A couple of years ago I went on a mystery novel kick and read a bunch of Agatha Christie for a month or two. While most of that was Hercule Poirot stories, I did read the novel that this film is based on. It’s widely considered Christie’s masterpiece, and I’m not confident that I could disagree with that assessment.

In fact, this is such a classic story that it’s been spoofed quite a bit. Murder by Death is straight out of this movie’s playbook, and there’s a great deal of this in Clue as well. There’s even a connection to a film like House on Haunted Hill. But that’s all beside the point. The premise is one you’ll be familiar with even if you aren’t familiar with this particular story. A group of eight people and a couple of servants are invited to an island where they are to spend the weekend at the behest of their host, a Mr. Owen.